Adobe releases Source Sans Pro, a new open source font

The font family is available under the OSI-approved SIL Open Font License.

Adobe has open sourced a new font family called Source Sans Pro. The font itself is now available in OTF and TTF formats. The company is also releasing the underlying source material so that the font can easily be modified and improved by third parties. Adobe is releasing the fonts under the terms of the SIL Open Font License, an OSI-approved license that broadly allows modification and redistribution.

Source Sans Pro was created by Adobe typeface designer Paul D. Hunt. He announced the availability of the font today in an entry that was published on Adobe’s Typblography blog. In the blog entry, he explains that the design was partly inspired by the visual simplicity of the Gothic fonts created by influential designer Morris Fuller Benton in the early 20th century.

Adobe aims to use the new font in its open source software applications. Hunt’s blog entry says that a preliminary version is included as a user interface font in Brackets, an open source code editor for Web development that Adobe is building with HTML5 on top of WebKit. Feedback from early users encouraged further refinement, such as adding a little tail to the lowercase "l" to help better distinguish it from an uppercase "I" character.

In addition to making the fonts and source material available for download, Adobe is also making it available through font hosting services, including Typekit (which Adobe acquired last year), and Google Web Fonts. Hunt’s blog post says that further improvements are on the horizon. Support for Cyrillic and Greek are planned. Adobe is also working on a fixed-width version that would be suitable for use in a terminal environment or code editor.

Professional-quality fonts that can be freely redistributed under open terms are highly valued by the open source software community. Such fonts are often widely adopted and used in many projects. Some recent examples of open fonts that were designed by professional typeface designers include Google’s Roboto font and Canonical’s Ubuntu font.

Maybe I'm way too optimistic for my own good, but it warms my heart to see that the world is slowly moving towards an open standards, open source society. Gordon Gecko's "Greed is good" attitude no longer applies.

I use Dina, which is nice, on the console and in (g)vim. It's easy to read, and designed for code. But it's a pixel font masquerading as a TrueType font, so it looks like shit at sizes other than some very specific ones, not fun!

I'm not a fan of monospaced fonts that take up a lot of space, I find it distracting.

Not as nice as the above listed by killing_time, but Anonymous Pro is a pretty damn good fixed-width font. Especially good for reviewing large chunks of code.

Update: just tried out Source Sans. The kerning of 'n', 'e', 'y', and 's' are seriously shot to hell in on-screen use. It's not as bad in Illustrator as Word and LibreOffice. Several other glyphs are pretty bad as well. Appears some glyphs have good kerning before but not after, others are the opposite. Try the phrase, "My this is bad kerning. Brown fox is not over the lazy dog." in Source Sans (trainwreck, I can't stop looking). It appears to print substantially better overall.

To the people complaining about kerning: so go fix it! That's (part of) the point of it being open source.

(A Wiki-style changelog and discussion page of competing check-ins of the kerning pair tables ad-infinitum would be amusing to watch for a day or two. Not that it looks like the Adobe guys are interested in additional contributors to the sourceforge project...)

Not as nice as the above listed by killing_time, but Anonymous Pro is a pretty damn good fixed-width font. Especially good for reviewing large chunks of code.

Update: just tried out Source Sans. The kerning of 'n', 'e', 'y', and 's' are seriously shot to hell in on-screen use. It's not as bad in Illustrator as Word and LibreOffice. Several other glyphs are pretty bad as well. Appears some glyphs have good kerning before but not after, others are the opposite. Try the phrase, "My this is bad kerning. Brown fox is not over the lazy dog." in Source Sans (trainwreck, I can't stop looking). It appears to print substantially better overall.

There is something about the kerning in the sample text shown in the picture that bothers me.

e.g. when you look at the word "instead" it seems like the "inst" part are spread out, and the "ead" are bunched together.

Yeah, and the O in domain, employed and interaction seems like it's floating, but it's fine in provide and models. Wonder if this has to do with the font size selected for that screenshot or screen rendering vs. print rendering issues.

Adding that descender to the 'l' now makes it inconsistant with the rest of the font.

I still use Bitstream's Vera family for a bunch of stuff. I like that the monospaced font has very clear 0-O and l-i-1s. They did the open source font thing in 2003. (download)

I like Ubuntu's commissioned, imaginatively named font personally. It also has a lot of distinction between 0/O and I/l/1. It seems that a lot of people consider it to be little more than a Frankenfont, though. Droid also works for me, I can usually go with either one. I'd like more good serif options. It seems like most of these new, libre fonts are primarily sans because they're made by/for developers working in IDEs all day.

Update: just tried out Source Sans. The kerning of 'n', 'e', 'y', and 's' are seriously shot to hell in on-screen use. It's not as bad in Illustrator as Word and LibreOffice. Several other glyphs are pretty bad as well. Appears some glyphs have good kerning before but not after, others are the opposite. Try the phrase, "My this is bad kerning. Brown fox is not over the lazy dog." in Source Sans (trainwreck, I can't stop looking). It appears to print substantially better overall.

I’ll take another look at the kerning. If testing in MS office, is the kerning turned on?

There is something about the kerning in the sample text shown in the picture that bothers me.

e.g. when you look at the word "instead" it seems like the "inst" part are spread out, and the "ead" are bunched together.

True, it did look like "in""stead" to me, but my biggest problem with it is the baselines - look at the word "the", as the curves at the bottom of the t and e are slightly lower than the base, the whole word looks like its been mis-set slightly (ie the h appears to float higher than the surrounding letters). I'm not keen on that, though... maybe he spent little time on it (Adobe might have given him a few hours to spare) and is still expecting feedback.

my biggest problem with it is the baselines - look at the word "the", as the curves at the bottom of the t and e are slightly lower than the base, the whole word looks like its been mis-set slightly (ie the h appears to float higher than the surrounding letters). I'm not keen on that, though... maybe he spent little time on it (Adobe might have given him a few hours to spare) and is still expecting feedback.

These overshoots of round characters are a typical feature in type design and lettering.

Maybe I'm way too optimistic for my own good, but it warms my heart to see that the world is slowly moving towards an open standards, open source society. Gordon Gecko's "Greed is good" attitude no longer applies.

No, this is in the best interests of Adobe's profits.

aaronb1138 wrote:

LoneWolf1510 wrote:

Now, adobe, a monospaced font too please.

Not as nice as the above listed by killing_time, but Anonymous Pro is a pretty damn good fixed-width font. Especially good for reviewing large chunks of code.

Update: just tried out Source Sans. The kerning of 'n', 'e', 'y', and 's' are seriously shot to hell in on-screen use. It's not as bad in Illustrator as Word and LibreOffice. Several other glyphs are pretty bad as well. Appears some glyphs have good kerning before but not after, others are the opposite. Try the phrase, "My this is bad kerning. Brown fox is not over the lazy dog." in Source Sans (trainwreck, I can't stop looking). It appears to print substantially better overall.

I like Ubuntu's commissioned, imaginatively named font personally. It also has a lot of distinction between 0/O and I/l/1. It seems that a lot of people consider it to be little more than a Frankenfont, though.

I like Ubuntu font family as well, and could not care less about that "a lot of people" - any popular font has its share of haters. However, it seems its development was slowed down, and some obvious bugs are still not fixed (for example, Cyrillic Г in Ubuntu Mono is very wrong).